The Family, the State, and the Novel in the Early Republic

Abstract

some of the central concerns involving the practices of the state and the family, and the institution of the novel in the early republic, a period roughly defined here as between the American Revolution and the Civil War; on the other, I want to show how these concerns have been re-examined but also replicated by recent literary and social historians working on the early republic. I am particularly interested in what has been called the new historicism and its effects on the study of the literature of the period. Focusing on the complicated relations among women and politics, the family and the state, and the home and the world, I want to proceed by looking at how these relations are thematized in some typical and resonant passages in the literature, and to move then to a more general consideration of the links between the literature and politics of the period.'